Having had a remote look at Berlin API Days through my 5 colleagues from Evojam that went to the conference and through social media lens I've gathered the following bird's eye view of the API ecosystem landscape.
- Swagger - it's the de-facto industry standard in API building.
- API is the web 15 years ago - the space of API design, production and delivery looks a lot like the web 15 years ago - clumsy, with lack of standards, strange concepts flying around. There's still a lot of work ahead of us and a lot of changes going happen and standards will emerge.
- Tools needed - there's a number of tools needed in the space:
- implementation validation - a tool that would automatically verify if the API you've implemented adheres to general standards and not only to its specification.
- GitHub for API - a place to work on, share and collaborate on APIs.
- Microservices - even though the topic is not new it seems it's just hitting the mainstream and there's a huge demand for it. We thought it's everyone's reality, since we've been building those for over 2 years.
- Hypermedia - it's the hot topic in the arena. It's the REST 2.0.
- SOAP - it's there. The tool producers all still support it, even when they don't brag about it. It's too popular to give up.
I'm curious what would you add to this list of meta-level observations?